Friday, June 08, 2007

Funding restored on VOA and RFE/RL services


Kim Andrew Elliott reports:
The 5 June markup of the House Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee fully restored funding for the following VOA language services: Albanian, Bosnian; Croatian, Greek, Macedonian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Georgian, Uzbek, Hindi, Cantonese, Thai, and Tibetan.
The mark also provides $8 million for VOA English, which more than fully restores the cuts to VOA English radio broadcasts. For Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the mark restores cuts to South Slavic [Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian], Romanian, Kazakh, Russian, and Ukrainian. For Radio Free Asia, the mark restores cuts to Tibetan and Cantonese language services.

Kim comments: It remains to be seen what the Senate Appropriations Committee will do. In 2006, it agreed with the White House/BBG proposal to cut those services. The two versions never made it to conference because of the distraction of the 2006 election.
See Kim’s charts of proposed cuts/additions for FY 2008 and not yet implemented but still (mostly) in effect proposal for FY 2007.
(Source: KimAndrewElliott.com/R Netherlands Media Network Weblog)